Mia Bakes: Healthy Date Muffins

 Hey lovely readers, it has been a while since my last post! Been bogged down by work and also overseeing renovation works of my new BTO. Hopefully there will be more baking (& cooking?!) recipes up here once I've settled down into my new house!

Anyway, here's a super quick and easy recipe for a healthy, dates muffin! Well, initially I wanted to make some sticky date pudding because there's 3 boxes of deglet noor dates in the house. But after preparing the "cake" portion, I got lazy to follow up with the caramel sauce and so.... a healthy date muffin it shall be! 

So let's get over with the ingredients, so we can get started!

To get 12 muffins, you'll need:

250g pitted dates

1 tsp baking soda

250ml boiling water

40g unsalted butter

40g unsweeten applesauce

185g plain flour

30g brown sugar

30g white sugar (I used stevia)

2 eggs

1.5 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

60g pumpkin seeds + roughly chopped walnuts

(or whatever seeds/nuts you fancy)

*60g of sugar makes a rather mild-tasting (not sweet AT ALL) muffin, do add more sugar if a sweeter tasting muffin is desired

In a clean bowl, add in your pitted (and roughly chopped) dates, baking soda and boiling water. Leave to soak for 20 to 30 minutes, until it has cooled down. 

In another bowl, add your butter, sugar and applesauce. Whisk until well combined. Crack in the eggs, one at a time, whisking until each egg is well combined before adding the next. Then, fold in the dry ingredients (flour, salt and baking powder) with a spatula until there's only a few stray pockets of flour left before folding in the dates mixture. Fold until nearly combined before folding in the pumpkin seeds until just combined; do not overmix! 

Spoon the batter into 12 muffin cups and bake in the oven that's pre-heated to 180 degrees Celsius for around 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. 

As mentioned earlier, these muffins are not-sweet-at-all (in spite of all those dates) with a bouncy, chewy texture, and make quite a decent (healthy) breakfast muffin! 

I've actually eaten mine with some peanut butter for breakfast, YUMS!

Till then,

Mia Foo